The Black Informant

Tracing the roots of black Liberalism in the US (Part IV)

As I mentioned in the last piece of the series, the Communist movement here in the US was having a very hard time trying to sell blacks on the concept of self-determination. If you remember, self-determination referred to succession–something that black folks did not want. All blacks wanted was to simply be treated as equals.
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But a question arises. As we have seen, the Communists prescribed two strategies for American Negroes: equal rights and self-determination. Equal rights would seem to refer to “integration.” whatever that is, but self-determination would seem to refer to “segregation.” whatever that is.

Isn’t this some sort of contradiction? Doesn’t one strategy tend to negate the other?

It is of supreme importance that we understand this answer to this question.

At the plenary meeting of the national committee of the Communist party in 1946, William Z. Foster complained:

One of the major difficulties we have had to contend with has been a tendency of our opponents to pose one of these currents to the other, thus making it appear that the demand for self-determination slogans is in contradiction to the proposition that Negroes fight for the fullest rights as Americans. Comrade Strong knocked this nonsense on the head when he pointed out so forcefully that it is impossible for the Negro people to achieve their full economic, political, and social equality as Americans unless they organize as a nation, unless they forward the slogan of self-determination for the Black Belt of the South. (emphasis added)
–As quoted in “The Communist Position (1947),” pp. 14-16

In other words, equal rights and self-determination not only aren’t antagonistic, they aren’t even complementary; they are one and the same thing. If it is impossible for the Negro people to get equal rights without self-determination, then it follows, does it not, that the struggle for equal rights is the struggle for self-determination.

(excerpt from It’s Very Simple: The True Story Of Civil Rights by Alan Stang)
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Notice how the Communist agenda was toned down to become palatable for a black community that was overwhelmingly anti-Communism. We’ll see this toned-down message begin to take shape in the years ahead.

You will actually see some early signs of this “alignment” of the Communist agenda with the plight of black Americans going back to the year 1939. This was the year that the song “Strange Fruit” was recorded by Billie Holiday:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

However, this song was not written by “Lady Day”. It was written by a Jewish schoolteacher by the name of Abel Meeropol who went by the name Lewis Allen. Here is a little about him:

Abel Meeropol (1903 - 1986) is best known under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, under which he wrote the song “Strange Fruit,” famously performed by Billie Holiday. The writer of countless poems and songs, including the Sinatra hit “The House I Live In,” Meeropol was also a teacher and ardent but closeted communist. As he and his wife were unable to have children he took his pseudonym from the intended names of their stillborn sons. He later was able to adopt Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s two sons after their parents’ execution. (from Wikipedia)

Although there may have been some legitimacy to Meeropol’s claim that he was deeply moved by the pictures of lynched blacks to write the song (I believe it actually started as a poem), what is certain is that he was committed to a movement that sought to use the plight of blacks as a way to cause dissent in the United States. By appearing to help our cause to be treated equal, it was little things like this that made this new brand of Communism less threatening.

Martin Luther King Jr.

In Dr. King’s autobiography, he describes his own personal investigation into the ideology behind Communism:

During the Christmas holidays of 1949 1 decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.

First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the round and essence of all reality–a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.

Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Community there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence, murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the “millennial” end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.

Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxist would argue that the state is an “interim” reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that end. And if any man’s so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.

This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself.

At this point, one can conclude that Dr. King completely rejected the doctrine of Communism. However, if you continue to read his analysis, we discover that there were some aspects of Communism that he likened unto the Civil Rights movement of his time:

Yet, in spite of the fact that my response to communism was and is negative, and I consider it basically evil, there were points at which at which I found it challenging. With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice. The Christian ought always to be challenged by any protest against unfair treatment of the poor.

… But in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me ever more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism had greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity. Thus capitalism can lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as the materialism taught by communism.

… My reading of Marx also convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth-century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both. (more from the Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.)

By no means would I classify Dr. King as a Communist. However, as he discusses in his autobiography, there were some aspects of the Communist ideology that he embraced. I believe that this was the early signs of modern day Liberalism in the black community.

Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism (from Wikipedia)

Wikipedia defines democratic socialism as follows:

…a broad political movement propagating the ideals of socialism within the context of a democratic system. In many cases, its adherents promote the ideal of socialism as an evolutionary process resulting from legislation enacted by a parliamentary democracy. Other democratic socialists favor a revolutionary approach that seeks to establish socialism by creating a non-parliamentary democratic system, usually based on workers’ councils or similar organizations.

Thinkers, writers and activists such as Robert Owen, Karl Marx, George Orwell, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb can all be said to have contributed to “democratic socialist philosophy”.

So as you can see, it appeared that King had adopted a more watered down version of the Communist platform.

Writer Marcus Epstein provides us with some evidence that King had embraced at least part of this ideology:

Though King was never a Communist and was always critical of the Soviet Union, he had knowingly surrounded himself with Communists. His closest advisor Stanley Levison was a Communist, as was his assistant Jack O’Dell. Robert and later John F. Kennedy repeatedly warned him to stop associating himself with such subversives, but he never did. He frequently spoke before Communist front groups such as the National Lawyers Guild and Lawyers for Democratic Action. King even attended seminars at The Highlander Folk School, another Communist front, which taught Communist tactics, which he later employed.

King’s sympathy for communism may have contributed to his opposition to the Vietnam War, which he characterized as a racist, imperialistic, and unjust war. King claimed that America “had committed more war crimes than any nation in the world.” While he acknowledged the NLF “may not be paragons of virtue,” he never criticized them. However, he was rather harsh on Diem and the South. He denied that the NLF was communist, and believed that Ho Chi Minh should have been the legitimate ruler of Vietnam. (more…)

I will also make note here that Stanley Levison also co-wrote many of King’s speeches.
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I challenge all of my readers to take the time to do your own study of the things that are mentioned in this series.

The next part of this series will deal with the Black Panther movement and briefly the decade of the 1970’s.

Here are links to the other parts of this series

I
II
III